2. The race problem.
3.The rising middle class.
Four of his famous novels:
The Sound and the Fury:喧哗与骚动 The title comes from one of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth：“A Tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It is a sad story of the Compsons It tells a story of deterioration from past to the present, and the suffering and spiritual state of the family. This is a once prominent , but now declined family. Mr.Compson, the Father, escapes into alcoholism and cynicism since he is unable to find meaning in the moral principle he was brought up with. Mrs.Compson, the Mother is spiritually weak, and has little to spare for her children. Caddy, the daughter, is the only one capable of loving, but loses her virginity and has an illegitimate kid. Quentin, lives in the ideal world of his youth with his dreams of love, honor, and integrity, but can not come to terms with the present which to him, is purposeless, futile and devoid of values which make life worth living. Jason, the eldest son, embodies all the vices of the modern world. His life is empty and meaningless. Love is alien to him, and so are other traditional humanist values. Benjy, the youngest son is an idiot. The first part is from the viewpoint of the idiot with no sense of time. The past and the present are interwoven in his mind. Readers vaguely know his feelings: he loses his the only love from caddy, his sister, and feels very lonely.
As I lay Dying 在我弥留之际： An absurd story, and expresses his nihilism and cynicism. After the wife dies, husband keeps his promise, and takes her coffin to Jefferson to bury her in her family’s graveyard. On the way there, they suffer a lot. The corpse begins to stink because of heat. One of the sons tries to set fire on it, but is stopped and sent to mental home. They are caught in a flood later. The other son gets injured when trying to stop the coffin from dropping into the water. After six days of exhausting journey, they arrive and bury the mother. Soon after that the husband gets a new wife and daughter goes to town to have abortion.
Light in August.八月之光: It is about how Joe Christmas, who is never sure of his racial identity, and can never find his position in the society, is manipulated by unreasonable social rules and maltreated to death miserably. By depicting and analyzing life in the south, it reveals the spiritual predicament of every man whose attitude toward life is indifference and denial, and condemns racial and religious discrimination. Joe Christmas is an illegitimate son. His mother dies at childbirth (her father refuses to send for a doctor). His father is unknown but may be a Negro. Grandfather is so disgusted with it that he leaves the baby with a home for orphans. There Joe never knew what love is. He is later adopted but the foster father has little warmth for him. Joe becomes a total stranger in the human world. His world is empty, nothing, and his attitude toward humanity is indifference and denial. He kills the foster father, and even the white lady whom he loves. Upon learning the story of a Negro and a white lady, the whole gets crazy and sets out in search of him. On Friday, he is put to death.
Absalom, Absalom.押沙龙 Thomas Sutpen is the son of poor white family. He comes to see the importance of birth and blood and family after he suffers humiliation at the gate of great houses. He is determined to make a lot of money and to build a great house. He goes to the West Indies and marries a woman. He deserts her and their son when he learns that she has Negro blood. Back in Jefferson, he builds a great mansion out of the blood and labour of the Negroes, remarries, and has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith. Years later, his eldest son comes here and falls in love with Judith. When he and Henry learn that the young man has Negro blood, they kill him. After the Civil War, he returns and gets married with a poor white girl whom he looks down upon. When he learns that his wife has borne him a girl not a boy, he gets furious, and this annoys his father-in-law, who shoots him dead. His mansion is burnt down. The novel reveals the inevitable fall of the aristocratic family.

1. There is a lot of interior monologue.
2. The modern stream consciousness technique is used.
3. Words are often run together, with no capitalization and no proper punctuation. Sentences are not always clearly indicated, many long one are pushed together in peculiar way.
4. His language ranges from colloquial, regional dialect to rhetorical.
5. A narrative method of gradually fitting in and of withholding or even giving confusing information.
Stream of consciousness: It is a widely used method and technique in modern literature. It is a kind of literary technique employed to demonstrate subjective as well as objective reality. It reveals the characters’ feelings, thoughts and actions, often following an associative rather than a logic sequence without commenting by the author.
Stream   in his writings:
1. Actions and plots are less important. He is interested in psychological analysis.
2. Time sequence is dislocated.
3. Multiple points of view
Chapter 16
Anderson   Lewis   Cather   Wolfe

Sherwood Anderson (舍伍德.安德森1876-1941)
Theme: the psychological and emotional aspect of American small-town life, with emphasis chiefly on low-class figures, the unsuccessful, the depraved, and the inarticulate.
(Anderson was a writer of an important period in American history: America passed from a rural to an industrial society. The transition had been a painful experience in small towns. Alienation, loneliness, and want of understanding and love, made life intolerable, and turned people into “grotesque”. Thwarted emotions, repressed drives, frustrated lives, and distorted natures became the distinct features of American small town life.
Winesburg, Ohio (小城畸人)
It consists of 25 short stories. Masterpiece of Anderson, an American classic. It is a book of the grotesques, of people each with a ruling kind of passion which distorts their personalities. All these people are seen suffocating in an environment, the dominant feature of which is want of understanding. Their stories reveal a nostalgic glance backward at “a kind of pastoral golden age” that has passed.
Hands: Myers, once a school teacher, was beaten out of his job because of his sensitive hands. In the school, he was much loved by the boys. He usually walked with boys in the evening, sat talking with them here and there. He caressed the shoulders of the boys, played about the untidy heads with his hands. In a way, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair was a part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young minds. But he was thought to be a homosexual, and was almost hanged. Since then, he was afraid to show his hands, always trying to hide them in his pockets. ( Good things are suspected and evil things are natural.)
Technique: He observed human grotesque and eccentricity from a Freudian psychological point of view and tried to reveal the abnormal states of mind.
Style: colloquial style, clarity, directness, simplicity.
Other works: The Triumph of the Eggs （鸡蛋的胜利）
            Death in the Woods （林中之死）
            I Want to Know Why（我想要知道为什么）
            Poor White (穷白人)
The Triumph of the Eggs: It reveals an miserable and ridiculous situation of an American couple from the viewpoint of a child. Father, a farmer becomes ambitious after he gets married with a teacher. First, they try to make fortune by raising chickens, but fail, because they die before hatched. Then they go to town and run a small restaurant. Father puts foetus in a bottle of alcohol, and shows it to the customers to attract them here, but in vain. He then plays conjuring with eggs. People do not enjoy all these, instead, they believe he has gone mad. He gets angry and drops the eggs onto the ground. The broken eggs symbolize their hollow dream which can not be fulfilled.